Now that the website has been revamped we’re going to try to put up a weekly blog post – just something simple to bring together anything new that’s been brought to our attention.

If you come across anything that you think would be beneficial to share with the AMHPs in the region, please send it to us. The best way to do this currently is through the ‘Contact us’ page on the website using the link above. It doesn’t have to be specifically something that has happened in the last week – just anything you think is worth sharing. It could be a news item, published article, book, TV or radio programme, blog post, event, press release – whatever seems of relevance to AMHPs.

The website itself is the biggest thing that’s happened internally in AMHPA. We’ve taken the plunge in doing it ourselves – in the hope that a WordPress-based site is as robust and easy to maintain as it appears. We would welcome any suggestions as to how to improve the site and look forward to seeing what evolves as more people become involved and we implement the incremental changes.

If you are an AMHP working in the North West of England or North Wales, please do register to the forum, introduce yourself and join in with the conversations. It has only just opened and therefore very quiet – we’d love to get some lively and serious discussions going in relation to AMHP practice.

The other AMHPA news is that we have our next conference event in Chorley on Friday and we’ll post a write-up next week. We’d very much like to get more feedback from members about the conferences and suggestions for future events.

As for the wider world of mental health law, the biggest news recently must surely be the opening of the Law Commission consultation on the ‘protective care’ framework, intended to replace the Deprivation of Liberty safeguards and related procedures.

You can download the consultation paper directly from the Law Commission

Alex Ruck-Keene posted today about the case of Secretary of State for Justice v KC and C Partnership NHS Foundation Trust [2015] on his ever-informative Mental Capacity Law and Policy website. The judgement clarifies the position in relation to Conditional Discharge and the use of DoLS to authorise a deprivation of liberty.

A handful of news items have also been brought to our attention.

Community Care has an article on Social Worker burnout following research in partnership with Queen’s University Belfast.

Also in Community Care, an item on the College of Social Work report on the impact of Cheshire West on AMHP practice. The author of the report, Emad Lilo (who sits on the board of AMHPA), will be presenting his report at this week’s AMHPA event in Chorley.

The Manchester Evening News had an article on the 13th July on the fall in mental health beds in the city whilst the demand increases.

Welcome – finally – to the new AMHPA website! It feels like it’s taken a long time for all of the right factors to fall in place before the change could be pushed through. Those of you with an insight into the way AMHPA is run, and the changes we have needed to implement, will know that there have been a lot of structural changes behind the scenes and that there has been complication at every stage.

The development of the ‘business end’ of AMHPA is a continuing saga – our desire to put AMHPA on a secure and completely transparent financial footing has met pitfall after pitfall but we can almost see the process coming to a sensible end. ‘AMHPA Ltd’ is not quite fully with us yet but AMHPA as an organisation is settling down after the upheaval of the last two years and we can finally start to look at our longer term aspirations for the organisation and – we hope – involve many more frontline AMHP members in the process.

I’ve personally been wanting to update the AMHPA website for a few years and it’s only now that we can do it properly with the means to manage our finances in a simple and transparent way. The setting up of ‘AMHPA Ltd’ has been absolutely necessary – in terms of financial probity and dealings with both Local Authorities and the services we buy in – but it has been a distraction from the real purpose of AMHPA which is to provide networking and development opportunities for AMHPs practising in the region. ‘AMHPA Ltd’ is truly only a part of what AMHPA is and can be – the company is the part for managing our financial affairs but AMHPA as an association can be what whatever the regional AMHPs are motivated to make it.

We need a basic website for communication – particularly for publicising our events and sharing presentation materials from the events. What we will also have is a blog through which we can share matters of broader interest in the field, give updates on the development of AMHPA and potentially provide a platform for AMHPA members to share their own material.

The next development will be a discussion group for AMHPA members – I’ll post more on this when it’s ready to go live but my hope for it is that it can be a structured forum for discussing AMHP practice issues in an informed and technical way. It’ll be something of an experiment and it might not work how I want it to – if at all! – but we can develop it as we go along.

Most of all, we want to hear from AMHPs as to what we want from AMHPA, the website and the live events. I think that we can do everything we want to through the inbuilt WordPress registration and login functions – I’ll be using bbPress for the discussion group – but please bear with me because this all being done from the basis of a well-intentioned amateur!